The incessant idea that I get when I read about quantum physics: with no observers and nothing to interact with/measure it, was the universe itself in superposition during the Big Bang? If so, did the wave function even collapse or are we just one of the possible outcomes inside of it?
That’s the wrong interpretation of “observing”. Observation is the act of measuring the properties of an object/particle by “interacting” with it. Basically if something is not being observed (I.e completely isolated) it enters superposition until such a time that it’s measured/interacted with again. Observation has nothing to do with consciousness imo, just connection to causality in the universe at large.
Never said anything about it not existing. From what I understood, a particle that’s not interacting with an outside force stays in superposition by default. The universe was supposedly a single particle at the moment of the Big Bang, thus it stands to reason that it would have been in superposition if it couldn’t interact with anything else.
If you trace back the cosmological evolution of our universe you’d get a “singularity”, that is not the same thing as being a single particle. Even the physical existence of a singular point at the beginning is not accurate. A singularity in physics is a mathematical artefact signaling the breakdown of the descriptive power of the theory you are using. The common example is the singular behaviour of the electric field around a charged particle in classical electrodynamics, the singularity is a signal that you’d need to switch to quantum electrodynamics to describe the physics close to a charged particle. Similarly with cosmology: close to the beginning we have a singularity that signals the breakdown of the descriptive power of our theories, and we need to switch. What we would switch to we call a " quantum gravity theory", but we are not yet sure what that theory is.
Mostly extreme metal, moreso since going back to college, but I also like post-rock, shoegaze, and classical amongst other things. Try this out for size.
Part of the beauty and awe I get whenever I reread that famous excerpt from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot is the sense of how ephemeral and delicate our existence, and even the very human concept of "existence", is. We are infinitesimally small and yet, through no fault of our own, our days, how we fill them, and the people we know hold some measure of importance to us. And it will all be gone - eventually. It's a very somber note yet it makes me feel a certain sense of peace.
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
Yet another vote for Bitwarden. I love that you can access your stuff through a browser without installing anything, I need that sometimes on my work pc where I cannot install anything.
Same, I have a playlist full of songs from games that I’ve played like Nier automata and Undertale. Used to think people who liked video game music were cringey until I started playing video games myself and found the songs very catchy
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